Quotes About Ambition

She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.

he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.

Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care.

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport.I even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over, but she didn't, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?

The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger-

When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it--and not get caught.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game

Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...

Involuntarily I glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby, he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I'll show the marks, don't you know.

He was born sleepless, without a talent for rest or the desire for it.

I matched my grey eyes against his brown ones for guile, my young golf-and-tennis heart-beats against his, which must be slowing a little after years of over-work. And I planned and I contrived and I plotted - any woman can tell you - but it never came to anything, as you will see. I still like to think that if he'd been a poor boy and nearer my age I could manage it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn't have.

If one can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.

going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.